


Moonlight Sonata

by toujours_nigel



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-02
Updated: 2013-02-02
Packaged: 2017-11-27 21:43:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/666806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel





	Moonlight Sonata

Moonlight ill-becomes her—it casts her skin into too harsh pallor, and drains the warmth from her hair’s vibrant red. She looks marmoreal in the moonlight, skin pale and hair stark against his dark sheets. Like this, she almost looks quiet—if his mother’s socialite friends could see her so, they would be less inclined to dismiss her out of hand. Asleep, moonlit, Lily looks like a sophisticate, like the women he’d grown up seeing—like Sirius’ mother, like his own, like the first Mrs. Malfoy, dead these many years, and like the mother of her daughter-in-law. He sits up, suddenly filled with twining desires to look upon her colour-drained face all night, and to get away from her. He compromises, coming around the bed to sit on the covers beside her—gently, so she does not even stir in her sleep. There is nothing in her, like this, that he has not seen in other faces; like this, he can even judge her, so distant does she feel from the girl he loves—Marlene McKinnon has smaller ears, Andromeda Tonks a better mouth, Alice Prewett’s hair is a thicker, darker red. He pulls a strand of hers through his fingers—it’s the colour of dried blood for all he remembers it the colour of fire.

He pushes up, revulsion winning, though some trace of fascination still holds him a moment more by the bed, before he hurries from their bedroom to the living room they share with Sirius—he’d offered to buy her a house in the same breath Sirius had offered to move out, and Lily had turned them both firmly down—time enough for a house, she’d said, when they were married. He’d chafed, then, at sharing his home with anyone, even Sirius, with whom he’d shared crib and bottle; now, he chafes to see the living room empty, and the door to Sirius’ dark bedroom hanging open, gently creaking. He needs distraction, but his distraction is likely holed up in a flat above Scribe’s Rare Books, doing unspeakable and possibly illegal things to a werewolf. And he grudges them that—Sirius and he are broken alike, and Remus is crossed with fractures and fault-lines. The girl in his bed is hale and heart-whole, and he hasn’t the words—hasn’t the courage—to show her how he is broken.

It is not that she would be unkind, she does not know how. He does, he learnt it at his mother’s knee—his mother was a Black—and dissembling before complex sentences. And he can easier crawl into Sirius’ bed and lie breathing the same breath than wake Lily and tell her how it pleases him, when she looks like his mother, his aunts, his cousins, how it heats his blood and quickens his flesh to see her death-dealing, to see her blood-smeared. There is still a dab of blood behind her ear—she did not see it, hidden beneath her hair, and he did not tell her. He likes her fire and blood and pink-veined marble. He had not known he would. He had not wanted to, he had not wanted her for that—he had wanted her because she was not that. She spoke loudly and without malice, she laughed, she swore, she giggled, she sat by the lake in the afternoon sun and read Shelley’s quite absurd poetry. He had wanted that, he had liked it. He knows—self-knowledge is overrated, but it is cold and lonely work, waiting to meet people who may die on the way—that he would have mocked her had she been his kin, thought her ill-bred and ill-brought-up. But it had all been so new to her, and she had been so new to him, and so alive, and so…

So simple—what use is it hiding truths from oneself, in the dark, that you have discovered in the dark as your blood ebbs out and your beloved’s face turns into the faces of all the women you have known? She had been so simple, Lily, and that had been half the attraction. That had not been any of the love, he is not quite that selfish. Lily is beautiful—so was his mother; intelligent—his great-aunt was a Ravenclaw and topped her batch; brave—he has cousins who are Aurors, and cousins who are Death-Eaters; warm—and none of them were that. She was warm. She is not, but nobody is, any more—all his jokes fall flat and all Sirius’ cut like glass shards lodged beneath his skin. Speak the truth—he fell in love with a girl who was warm and to whom magic was still wonderful, and the war turned her into an echo and a shadow of his jaded, cynical relatives.

And he has fallen even more in love with her—he has never loved her more than this night when she pulled him to safety. He has never wanted her more—he would have had her then, rutted against a wall with their enemies still lying stunned and bound, and the tang of magic heavy in the air. And she had brought him home and tended to him and put him gently to bed. Like a child, like a mother—not his mother, never her—like he is weak and fragile and she the strong one. And she is, has never not been, but he had been content, so long, to have her conceal her steel, that he forgot—never knew—how it dazzled his eyes. It hurts to have it hidden again, as much as and more than the flesh still growing on his ribs. She has hidden herself away, safe behind smiles and fussing, and it rankles that he never knew her capable of so doing, never knew she was hiding from him as he from her.

As he still is hiding, in the soft darkness of a room hidden from moonlight behind the heavy drapes they—he and Sirius, that old familiar, familial, bond still stronger than this new one still strange to the heart—filched from his house years back, in the persistent denial of the truths that make everything easier save his own self. Because his own self is small and cruel and selfish, and he hides it behind a smokescreen of humour and valour, and he loved a girl nothing like his kin and she showed him how to let his humour and valour turn from shield to sword, with her love made him worthy of it, and led him gently from the dark corners his kin inhabited to the broad, shallow spaces of her mind. She showed him her life that is simply black-and-white, and he let her, and blindly followed her, and sought to leave his greys behind—Sirius knew, Sirius mocked him and retreated deeper into the shadows, and there is a rift between them now that neither wants to cross—and he went into battle armed with her faith. And she went with him, and danced gleeful into the dark, her self a flaming brand, and he watched, and fell in love with this valkerie who wears the bodies of all his kin, and it hurts to admit how his self found peace in her, how comforting she seemed, how familiar.

But it does no good to hide, when the tides of his blood are so in tune with hers, when the breath of her sleeping body calls so to him like the sirens calling sailors to their blissful death. It does no good, and he goes to her, stopping only to light the candles by their bed and watch their flames light her skin to a warm glow, enflame her hair, drive the marble and the blood from her. And yet the moonlight persists and silvers her eyelids, and the one hand lying on his pillow. And he draws it to his lips, and her to himself, and she moans, wordless and incoherent in her sleep, and settles into his arm, and sighs, content, slipping into deeper slumber. He looks out the open window at the moonlit night and lets his breath slow to hers in sleep, familiar and familial.


End file.
